Road Trip Day 7 - Hotter than ****

It's still HOT here. Hot, humid, sticky.

Started off the morning with a load of laundry. *whee*. Fun eh? We had breakfast in the hotel. Really getting tired of fast food for sure.

Headed off to the Bluebonnet Swamp natural area. In a word? "spider" would be the word. Plus the heat. Even at 9:30 a.m. the heat and humidity was just awful. From the parking area there were two paths to the visitor center, a boardwalk through the trees and a gravel maintenance road. We were good people and followed our instructions. Huge swamp spiders had webs strung across the boardwalk (usually over our heads, but a couple we had to bat out of the way). This was FREAKY to say the least. None of us like spiders much. And these were strangers to us. They were really colorful anyway. We did a "fear is the mind killer" reality check and finally made it to the visitor center unscathed. One of the two ladies working there was a little bit scornful of our "trial by spider". "They won't hurt you." Okay, whatever you say lady. But they are still pretty danged scary looking. They handed us a laminated trail guide and sent us on our way. We braved about 1/4 mile, but especially nice to see was an older lady power walking the trail. Needless to say, we picked HER way! It appeared she knew what she was doing. We figured, later, that the visitor entrance boardwalk was overrun because they have so few visitors. The swamp was pretty cool. I showed the kids what Cypress Knees are. *woooo* *shouts of excitement*. Oh, I also stepped on some red ants and one bit me. Luckily I didn't have many on my foot and was able to shake the rest off or kill them. Nasty critters. After hearing a couple of birds and barely seeing any (they were just too high up in the trees) we went back to the visitor center and looked at the exhibits. They had a few baby alligators which was neat, and a lot of snakes and turtles. The gal we saw power walking was with a man who seemed to be the volunteer photographer for the swamp. Many, many of his very great photos of the swamp creatures, birds and flora were posted inside the center. Excellent photos. He did comment to me that it was a slow bird day. He was down on the ground photographing a wasp as we left. We left by way of the maintenance road..... Imagine that! No spiders. It was only 10:30. As promised I did not keep the kids there more than one hour! Hooray.

Next we headed downtown. We toured the Old State Capitol building. There were some really interesting exhibits inside this building. One exhibit traced the moveable history of the Lousiana State Capitols. There were between 15 and 20 different places that the capitol was located for various reasons.

We walked over to River Road and entered the U.S.S. Kidd veterans museum. I really enjoyed this. I know any veteran would spend a lot of time here. We spent a couple of hours. First we bought sodas to rehydrate ourselves. You just cannot imagine walking around in this heat and humidity all day. We decided to tour the ship first. Mr. Leroy Jenkins who actually served on the Kidd was the ticket taker and I enjoyed talking to him about his time. He told me where his bunk was located. I asked him if he went down those little tiny stairs backwards or forwards. He said that when they would go down they would seldom use the stairs at all, just take the first two steps and then grab a bar and swing down the rest of the way. It was really fun talking to him and he showed me some pictures of his navy football days. The ship was very interesting and I took lots of pictures which I'll post later. We walked back over to the museum and toured all the exhibits there which included some personal effects of Kidd himself.

We had a little snack at the FrostyMug, a little dinner from the 50s. Awesome root beer float! Back at the hotel I watched Val Kilmer in "The Saint". We had dinner at Parrain's. Jordan and I shared an "everything" plate and had some fried alligator, oysters, crab fingers, shrimp, stuffed shrimp. They put PEANUTS in the cole slaw. It is GOOD that way too! We also got to sample the dirty rice and the seafood gumbo. Both were very good.

Time to pack and head home tomorrow.